I wanted it to be a pretty garden, with roses. I wanted pinks and mauves. So many of the plants are for the colour. I’m not a native plant person. I like exotics. Scent is really important to me too. I love the flowers themselves, but I love the smell of them. That’s definitely a growing up thing, it’s how my mum gardened. That’s why roses are probably my favourite flower. My garden is a real mixture though.

I get a lot of my bits and pieces from Victoria and I’ve got these gorgeous too little clematis plants. I’m just getting around to planting them, after putting them aside, and all the leaves have been eaten by slugs!

I love ordering plants from Tesselaar, some of the Aquilegia are from there, and other bits and pieces. I buy my roses from Treloars, out of habit, because my mother used to. I get so excited when I get the new catalogue and I think, ‘I can buy these new little bits and pieces and put them in the garden’. I’m a tragic. My camellias at the front are all from Camellia Grove.

I’ve got lots of edible plants. I’ve got two little blueberries bushes, but one has fruit and one doesn’t. There is a huge grapefruit tree – I guarantee we had 100 grapefruits last season. We eat them, and we gave them away to people. Along with the grape vine, that’s been there since we bought the house 30 years ago. There is a huge Kaffir plum tree. It gets a lot of fruit. I don’t do anything with it, but apparently you can make jam.

There is a nectarine too. I really like fruit trees. I like to be able to use lemons and oranges and I just like to have the trees in the garden. That’s probably not so much from my mum, because we grew up in a fruit and vegetable shop, so we didn’t need to grow fruit. There’s just something about the trees, and having them there. I like the look of them, and I like the blossoms that come.

My neighbour’s garden is just stunning. It’s an inspiration and I can see it over the fence. It’s a vegetable garden. There’s a macadamia tree in there, which is very exciting and my passion fruit grows up through it and my wisteria. They have chickens too.

I like having relaxation spaces in the garden too.

The rest of the household uses it, but it’s me who takes care of the garden, absolutely. There are always things to do. When I’m busy everything gets quite neglected. At the moment, the grapevine needs to be tied up. The parsley has gone to seed. It doesn’t matter though, I just let it come up again itself. There were baby eggplants last year and a couple of them came back, and a capsicum that self-seeded. And there are plants that have gone berserk, the rosemary, the curry plant, the basil.

Last year, we had chillies down the end because my son’s friend was growing chillies, and I thought ‘that might be fun’, so he have me a few. But I had to do better. So I ended up with about ten chilli plants, and I had great fun watching them. I had a veggie garden too. We had tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicums, eggplants. This year my mother is ill so I don’t have as much time in the garden. So the things that get watered are the things on the way from the kitchen to the washing line, everything else has to survive itself.

I have a guy who comes when it gets completely out of control. He cut the trees down for me because I don’t want to climb up the ladder now – I used to do that. But I do most of the garden work. It’s a joy actually: I really love it.

There’s a typical type of little garden I make by combining plants. I will mix some salvia with some parsley in the bottom of a pot with a fruit tree. Or I’ll put geraniums around the roses, or make a little partnership with some thyme. I like to put together the purples and the whites.

My mother wouldn’t have ever done that. She liked everything being really pristine. Most of my plants have just grown their way. Mum always had annuals and she always had geraniums because they were great for symmetry. But I like some gardens I look in books. I like cottage gardens.

I think about the light and shade a lot. I chopped a lot back because the trees were shading so much I couldn’t dry the clothes on the line anymore. I am planning some deciduous plants now, for a bit of interest, maybe some crab apples or something like that. I need to get the sun in winter, but some shade in summer. I think about that, and aspect is really important.

I could spend all day every day in the garden. When I’m retired.